Why Didn't Fox News Translate to a McCain Victory?

Okay, we all know Fox News kills the competition when it comes to the ratings. This has been going on for some time now. But, given their huge ratings, and their obvious right-wing, conservative slant, how is it that Barack Obama won the last presidential election? Why didn't Fox News' huge ratings success translate to John McCain winning in a landslide? Well, that's because television (and radio) ratings don't necessarily translate to the viewpoint of the country as a whole.

I can remember hearing the ratings for the local radio stations while living in Los Angeles and discovering that the one Spanish speaking station in town continually got the highest ratings (this was a few years back when there was only one Spanish speaking station in LA). That just didn't make any sense to me. I knew of several stations that seemed to have a large following... the pop station (KIIS-FM), the rock station (KLOS-FM), the alternative rock station (KROQ-FM)... the dance station (Power 106)... how was it that a station that didn't even speak English out drew them all?

Well, the answer lay in the fact that it DIDN'T speak English. Had they spoke in English, they would have been competing with every other English speaking radio station in town. But, their listening audience was a very distinct and cohesive group. Every Spanish speaking person in Los Angeles had one place to go on the radio dial. In contrast, the English speaking audience spread their "listernership" over the dozens of other staions that were offered.

It's much the same with Fox News. They have a very distinct and cohesive group of listeners. They get the far right-wing listeners who love to hear how evil liberals are and how much liberals hate America. Fox panders to those who do not, under any circumstance, want to hear how Republicans might have messed up or that a Democrat might have been correct about a particular issue. Their viewers want to be reassured that the beliefs they hold dear, no matter how skewed or vindictive they might be, are based in the Truth.

So, Fox News has its solid core of watchers, whereas the rest of the population; moderate Republicans, moderate Democrats, farther left-leaning liberals, spread their viewership out over the remaining tv and radio stations. More people don't watch Fox News than do, but Fox News has more listeners than any one station, by far.

Just don't be fooled into believing that the success of Fox News translates to them having a stranglehold on the hearts and minds of the majority of the population.

We took a little vote last November that proved that is not the case.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Jesus Loves The Little Children (wait, not you)

Image
Jesus loves the little children All the children of the world Red and Yellow, Black and White They are precious in his sight Jesus loves the little children of the world Singing this song is one of my earliest memories from growing up going to Sunday school. It taught me that all of us, no matter what we look like or where we come from, are loved by the God we were gathering to worship twice on Sundays and Wednesday nights.  This song taught me that I should accept those who might look differently than me (which, growing up in a small, whites only town in Indiana, was a rare occurrence, to be sure), because GOD loved them.  That was the point, wasn't it? That if God loved these people, then we should, too? This week we saw a story about the popular, and notoriously anti-LGBTQ, food chain Chick-fil-A and the reaction some on the right had when discovering Chick-fil-A's website included a section on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) and that they had "just hired" a...
Read more

Impeach Trump: Now

Image
The Democrats should be moving full speed ahead on impeaching the president. This is the moment where, historically, Democrats have chosen to take the sensible, well-thought out, reactionary way forward, when what was needed was for them to grab ahold of the narrative and shape it to THEIR will. We don’t need to wait and contemplate while hoping the unredacted version of the Mueller Report gets released soon (we’ve seen enough already). What Trump does so well is to set the framing of the narrative. For instance, when he repeatedly made his racist birther claims about President Obama, Trump introduced a frame, a worldview, that included the possibility of Obama not being an American citizen. The narrative within that frame, whether for or against, necessarily included discussion of Obama’s citizenship, a topic we’d never addressed before in reference to a sitting president. It didn’t matter that his birtherism claims weren’t true, they became a part of the narrative, the disc...
Read more

McConnell's Misplaced Historical Precedent

“You have to go back to 1880 to find last time a Senate controlled by a different party from the president confirmed a Supreme Court justice to a vacancy created in the middle of a presidential election,” McConnell said on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday morning, turning to historical precedent. This isn’t even an honest point (shocking!). It’s a complete Red Herring. A misdirection. The point isn’t that this particular situation hasn’t happened since 1880, the argument McConnell should be making is to point out ALL the times since 1880 where this exact situation actually presented itself , and then a nomination wasn’t even considered. Just like Merrick Garland wasn't even considered. That would be historical precedent.
Read more